Colorado

The Piceance Basin — unconventional gas

The Piceance Basin in northwest Colorado contains trillions of cubic feet of natural gas, offering an immense amount of energy in America’s backyard. ExxonMobil and its predecessors have been operating here since the 1950s, producing modest amounts of gas that were relatively easy to extract. The majority of the gas, however, is in scattered pockets deep underground in rocks as dense as cement. Although the industry has known about these “tight gas” deposits for decades, they were generally left behind because they were too difficult and expensive to recover.

ExxonMobil engineers are using proprietary, innovative technologies including Multi-Zone Stimulation Technology (MZST) and Just-in-Time Perforating (JITP) system to recover that gas with great precision and less environmental impact.

Rio Blanco County, home of ExxonMobil’s Piceance project, covers an area larger than 3,000 square miles (see map) and contains enough clean-burning, domestic natural gas to benefit millions of consumers.  ExxonMobil’s leases hold a potential resource of more than 45 trillion cubic feet of gas, recoverable over the life of the project. That volume could power 50 million homes for almost a decade.

ExxonMobil's innovative solutions significantly reduce environmental impact. The Piceance project uses a single pad to drill up to nine wells from each location, and includes initiatives to protect wildlife, as well as programs to reuse produced water and reduce the use of fresh water.

With increased natural gas production in the Piceance Basin and additional investments planned, ExxonMobil is committed to building long-term partnerships in Rio Blanco County and northwest Colorado.

Our projects to unlock the natural gas potential of Colorado's Piceance Basin have the potential to contribute to a substantial increase to U.S. gas production. Such projects help strengthen energy security by increasing and diversifying supplies available to Americans.

Technology breakthrough opens new U.S. natural gas resources

ExxonMobil’s application of advanced technology in the Piceance Basin is developing a source of clean-burning energy for U.S. consumers in a way that is mindful of the history, land and culture of northwest Colorado.

Traditional technologies make recovery of huge natural gas reserves costly and inefficient, meaning that until now, only the most prolific gas reserves have been developed.  The conventional process requires breaking open or fracturing the subsurface zones containing the gas to create channels for the gas to flow back through the rock, into a well-bore, and up to the surface for transmission to market.

In the late 1990s, ExxonMobil research and development teams set out to create new technologies to enable more efficient development of unconventional natural gas resources.  They created ExxonMobil’s proprietary Multi-Zone Stimulation Technology (MZST) and Just-in-Time Perforating (JITP) system.  The new technology enables significantly greater access to the Piceance Basin’s “tight gas” deposits up to 16,000 feet deep in scattered pockets in rocks as dense as cement.

Watch this video to learn more about MZST.

The project team at Piceance uses the ExxonMobil optimization process called Fast Drill to analyze the amount of energy used to make the drilling process faster and more efficient. Next, MZST fractures the dense rock containing the tiny tight gas pockets. (see video)

Fracturing involves bringing in a small fleet of specialized trucks equipped with high-pressure pumps.  Working together, they push fluid down the well and into the reservoir at flow rates and pressures high enough to force long cracks in the rock. Cracks are formed that run from the wellbore to more than 1,000 feet into the reservoir rock.

Conventional fracturing may involve only four to five hydrocarbon zones.  In the Piceance basin, the relatively thin layers of sands containing gas are isolated but often within 20 feet of one another.  To optimize production from a well, as many as 50 gas-rich zones may have to be fractured.

ExxonMobil’s multi-zone stimulation techniques and tools quickly isolate a target zone, perforate the casing and fracture the rock, all in one continuous process.

Working from the bottom of the well up, specialists perforate the well casing where tight gas reservoirs have been identified. To allow the gas to flow, sand and recycled water from production operations are forced at high pressure through the perforations. This creates a network of highly permeable pathways that extend hundreds of feet from the well bore. Gas flows into the well via the newly created pathways, and this process can be repeated in rapid succession for the many zones within a single well.